OCR technology allows you to translate images to text from a scanned or photographed document. And with free software, it is as easy as it sounds.
We have reached a very high level of sophistication when it comes to text recognition. To the point of being able to translate a text in real-time just by focusing it with your phone's camera. But in certain tasks, there is still a long way to go, such as translating image to text.
An example of complex tasks that don't seem so complex is document scanning. That is, turn tons of paper into digital documents that you can copy, share and edit from any device.
And here the key is in what we know as OCR, an acronym for optical character recognition, in Spanish optical character recognition. One of the most popular OCR engines is Tesseract OCR, which you will find in its own repository on GitHub. Anyone can download and use it freely since it has an Apache free software license.
Among its peculiarities, it is compatible with any operating system, its development continues thanks, in part, to funding from Google, and it emerged in the Hewlett-Packard laboratories. Its current version, Tesseract 4, allows image-to-text to be translated using neural networks. In addition, it supports more than 100 languages. Its only drawback, it works on the command line.
Free OCR recognition for everyone
But when there is a problem or inconvenience in free software, a solution always emerges. If you want to use Tesseract OCR but you do not handle well with the command line, although its repository has help documentation, we can install a front-end to use this technology from a graphical application, which we are more familiar with.
One of these front-ends is gImageReader. What this software does is offer us a graphical interface from which to interact with Tesseract OCR without using the command line.
This software is also free and licensed, specifically GPL 3.0. We can install it on Windows and Linux. What's more, it's available in the Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE, and ArchLinux repositories.
Its purpose is, using Tesseract OCR technology, to convert an image to text. That is, we open one or more image files and the tool will detect the text to extract it and obtain it as a Word document.
It allows opening PDF files or images from different devices, even from screenshots or if we have copied the image to the Clipboard. The text recognition process can be done by hand, almost by hand, or using the automatic method. Choosing one or the other will depend on the quality of the scanned image, the type of text, etc.
In addition to the OCR task itself, gImageReader provides tasks for when you have the text already converted. For example, you can edit the text, format it, or correct it if it has grammar or spelling errors.
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